A sand-coloured circle, a square, a body … Off White is a large-scale photographic work, eleven square pictures – a suite. In ancient Greek geometry the circle, »kyklos«, represented the perfect figure, in the Middle Ages a heavenly figure; in Kalkau’s work it is a scene.

Kalkau is particularly known for her minimalistically tight and very precise white sculptures, but she has also worked consistently with photography, juxtaposing geometrical shapes and her own body in hybrids – the coalescence of sculpture and body. With her examinations of ancient shapes and objects such as the cube, the sphere, the oval, the prism, the sarcophagus and the vessel, Kalkau, since the middle of the nineties, has had a wide-ranging dialogue with the sculptural tradition from the ancient Egyptians to the Minimalists and up until now.

She often finds inspiration in an older, classic work, a non-committal starting point for a freely associative examination of shapes, and not seldom we sense an allusion to something recognizable in the abstract and simple shapes. Beneath the formal surface of Kalkau’s works we find a dreamlike narrative, in which fantasy and reality melt together. The works revolve around transformation and the creation process. Through Kalkau’s performative and exploring work with the photograph, the boundaries between the classic media, the sculpture and the photograph are examined and dismantled.

Off White is a photo suite; a painted wood slice, a piece of cloth, a body …